Manufacturing Bob Marley | The New Yorker

When Bob Marley died, on May 11, 1981, at the age of thirty-six, he did not leave behind a will. He had known that the end was near. Seven months earlier, he had collapsed while jogging in Central Park. Melanoma, which was first diagnosed in 1977 but left largely untreated, had spread throughout his body. According to Danny Sims, Marley’s manager at the time, a doctor at Sloan Kettering said that the singer had “more cancer in him than I’ve seen with a live human being.” As Sims recalled, the doctor estimated that Marley had just a few months to live, and that “he might as well go back out on the road and die there.”

Marley played his final show on September 23, 1980, in Pittsburgh. During the sound check, he sang Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust” over and over. He asked a close friend to stay near the stage and watch him, in case anything happened. The remaining months of his life were an extended farewell, as he sought treatment, first in Miami and then in New York. Cindy Breakspeare, Marley’s main companion in the mid-seventies, remembered his famed dreadlocks becoming too heavy for his weakened frame. One night, she and a group of women in Marley’s orbit, including his wife, Rita (to whom he had remained married, despite it being years since they were faithful to one another), gathered to light candles, read passages from the Bible, and cut his dreadlocks off.

Drafting a will was probably the last thing on Marley’s mind as his body, which he had carefully maintained with long afternoons of soccer, rapidly broke down. Marley was a Rastafarian, subscribing to a millenarian, Afrocentric interpretation of Scripture that took hold in Jamaica in the nineteen-thirties. By conventional Western standards, the Rastafarian movement can seem both uncompromising (it espouses fairly conservative views on gender and requires a strict, all-natural diet) and appealingly lax (it has a communal ethos, which often involves liberal ritual use of marijuana). For Marley, dealing with his estate probably signified a surrender to the forces of Babylon, the metaphorical site of oppression and Western materialism that Rastas hope to escape. When he died, in Miami, his final words to his son Stephen were “Money can’t buy life.”

“This will business is a big insult,” Marley’s mother, Cedella Booker, told a Washington Post reporter in 1991, as his estate navigated its latest set of legal challenges. “God never limit nobody! Jah never make no will!” Neville Garrick, a close friend who designed many of Marley’s album covers, mused in the 2012 documentary “Marley” that it may have been the singer’s final test, one in which “everybody reveal who they really were, you get me? Who really did love him, who fighting over the money.” It would have been out of character for Marley to neatly divvy up his property. “Bob left it open.”

No one metric captures the scale of Bob Marley’s legend except, perhaps, the impressive range of items adorned with his likeness. There are T-shirts, hats, posters, tapestries, skateboard decks, headphones, speakers, turntables, bags, watches, pipes, lighters, ashtrays, key chains, backpacks, scented candles, room mist, soap, hand cream, lip balm, body wash, coffee, dietary-supplement drinks, and cannabis (whole flower, as well as oil) that bear some official relationship with the Marley estate. There are also lava lamps, iPhone cases, mouse pads, and fragrances that do not. In 2016, Forbes calculated that Marley’s estate brought in twenty-one million dollars, making him the year’s sixth-highest-earning “dead celebrity,” and unauthorized sales of Marley music and merchandise have been estimated to generate more than half a billion dollars a year, though the estate disputes this.

Inevitably, the contention over the estate mirrors the larger struggle over the legacy—over the meanings of Marley. The accounting of merchandise and money might feel like a distortion of Marley’s legacy, of his capacity to take the lives of those who suffered and struggled and turn them into poetry. But the range of Marley paraphernalia also illustrates the nature of his appeal. He became a way of seeing the world. Although he adhered to an ordered, religious belief system for most of his life, praising Jah, the Rastafarian name for God, whenever he could, he came to embody an alternative to orthodoxy. His lyrics lent themselves to a kind of universalist reading of exodus and liberation. He was one of the first pop stars who could be converted into a life style. Bob left that open, too.

In “So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley” (Norton), the reggae historian and collector Roger Steffens estimates that at least five hundred books have been written about Marley. There are books interpreting his lyrics and collecting his favorite Bible passages, parsing his relationship to the Rastafarian religion and his status as a “postcolonial idol,” reconstructing his childhood in Jamaica and investigating the theory that his death was the result of a C.I.A. assassination effort. His mother and his wife have written memoirs about living with him, as have touring musicians who were only briefly proximate to his genius. He has inspired countless works of fiction and poetry, and his later years provided the basic outline for parts of Marlon James’s prize-winning 2014 novel, “A Brief History of Seven Killings.” Steffens’s “So Much Things to Say” isn’t even the first book about Marley to borrow its title from the 1977 song; Don Taylor, one of his former managers, published a book with the same title, in 1995.

Steffens was introduced to reggae in 1973, after buying a Bob Marley album. In 1976, he made the first of many trips to Kingston, Jamaica, in search of records and lore, and two years later he co-founded “Reggae Beat,” a long-running radio show on Santa Monica’s KCRW. Being an early adopter paid off. Six weeks after the show’s première, Island Records offered him a chance to go on the road with Marley for the “Survival” tour. In 1981, Steffens co-founded a reggae-and-world-music magazine, The Beat, which was published for nearly thirty years; in 1984, he was invited to convene the first Grammy committee for reggae music. Steffens has made a career out of being a completist, amassing one of the most impressive collections of reggae ephemera on the planet, overseeing a comprehensive collection of Marley’s early work (the eleven-disk “The Complete Bob Marley & the Wailers 1967-1972”), and co-writing the exhaustive 2005 “Bob Marley and the Wailers: The Definitive Discography.”

At this point, books about Marley tend to be self-conscious about the risks of further mythologizing him, even if they end up doing so anyway. Steffens tries to avoid this by framing “So Much Things to Say” as four hundred pages of “raw material,” drawing from interviews he conducted over three decades with more than seventy of Marley’s bandmates, family members, lovers, and confidantes, some of whom have rarely spoken on the record. Occasionally, excerpts from interviews and articles from other authors are reprinted, too. What emerges isn’t a different Marley so much as one who feels a bit more human, given to moments of diffidence and whim, whose every decision doesn’t feel freighted with potentially world-historical significance.

Marley was born on February 6, 1945, to Norval and Cedella Marley. Cedella was eighteen at the time, a native of Nine Mile, a rural village with no electricity or running water. Little is known about Norval, an older white man who had come to Cedella’s village to oversee the subdivision of its lands for veterans’ housing. He was, according to a member of the white Marley family, “seriously unstable,” rarely seeing Cedella and Bob before he died, of a heart attack, in 1955, at the age of seventy.

Because of Bob’s mixed blood, he was often teased as “the little yellow boy” or “the German boy.” He was described as shy, resourceful, and clever. In 1957, Marley and his mother moved to Kingston, settling in a dense, ramshackle neighborhood referred to as Trench Town. Marley fell in with a crowd that dreamed of making music. He formed a group with Neville (Bunny Wailer) Livingston, Peter Tosh, Beverley Kelso, and Junior Braithwaite. They eventually called themselves the Wailers, and their sound fused American-style soul harmonies with the island’s jumpy ska rhythms. Under the guidance of Joe Higgs, a singer and producer, the Wailers were a local sensation by the mid-sixties. But island stardom brought little financial security. After moving briefly to Wilmington, Delaware, where his mother had relocated, Marley returned to the Wailers in 1969, just in time for a revolution in Jamaican music: the jolting, horn-inflected styles of ska and rocksteady were slowing down. Reggae was the new craze.

The Wailers continued to record and tour in the early nineteen-seventies. A brief but fruitful collaboration with the eccentric producer Lee (Scratch) Perry produced two outstanding albums, “Soul Rebels” (1970) and “Soul Revolution” (1971). Beyond a novelty hit or two, cracking the international market remained a distant dream for reggae artists. The distinctive rhythms had crept into American pop music in other forms, though. The influential American funk drummer Bernard (Pretty) Purdie credits studio sessions he played with the Wailers for the “reggae feel” he brought to early-seventies Aretha Franklin classics—“Rock Steady” and “Daydreaming”—and the American singer Johnny Nash introduced a pop-reggae sensibility in the late sixties and early seventies, with hits like “Hold Me Tight” and “I Can See Clearly Now.”

Nash had gone to Jamaica in search of new sounds and collaborators, and he soon came to recognize it as a hotbed of talent. He took Marley and the Wailers under his wing, bringing them on as an opening act during an English tour in late 1970. But Nash left them stranded there. Unhappy with the direction of their careers, they sought out Chris Blackwell, the owner of Island Records. Blackwell, who was raised in Jamaica, had started his label as a way of exporting the popular music he had grown up with. He gave the band money to return to Jamaica and to record its next album. A slow-burning masterpiece full of spiritual lyricism and expansive grooves, “Catch a Fire” (1973) marked a turning point for the reggae album—as did the decision to appeal to rock fans by adding guitar solos and synthesizer to the album’s final mix.

There are a few reasons that oral history has become the preferred format for revisiting the recent past. It’s designed to provide open-ended, immersive filibusters, balancing projection with hazy memory, marquee voices with obscure bystanders, a charismatic superstar with the accountant who kept the operation afloat. At a time when quick takes abound, the labor-intensive nature of the form, as well as the seeming lack of a writerly voice or perspective, gives the impression of relating everyone’s side. It’s the perfect approach in the age of the data dump, a way of making room for readers to sift through materials, discover their own resonances, and, in the case of “So Much Things to Say,” decide which shady, finger-pointing label boss or business manager to trust.

Steffens generally resists hagiography. Kelso, one of Marley’s lifelong confidantes, suggested that he was occasionally “rough” toward Rita, and that she nearly divorced him. Joe Higgs, the Wailers’ early mentor, contends that Marley’s mother—one of his biggest advocates after his death—was largely absent during his formative years as an artist, and wanted him to become a welder. Steffens also reprints Archbishop Abuna Yesehaq’s oft-repeated but never verified claim to have baptized Marley at the end of his life, which would have been a betrayal of his Rastafarian faith.

In one particularly engrossing section, Steffens confronts Carl Colby, a documentary filmmaker who had surprisingly unfettered access to Marley in the mid-seventies. Colby, whose father was the C.I.A. director William Colby, is at the center of a few far-fetched Marley-related conspiracy theories. Some people believe that Carl Colby dispatched the gunmen who opened fire on Marley’s home in 1976, shortly before he was scheduled to play a peace concert organized by the Jamaican prime minister, Michael Manley, who was seen as an enemy of American interests. There are those who think Colby gave Marley a “poisoned boot” that supposedly caused his cancer. Colby denies the allegations.

In contrast to other popular Marley books, in which every detail merely anticipates the singer’s eventual breakthrough, Steffens’s contribution is his nerdish monomania. Timothy White’s “Catch a Fire,” published in 1983, remains the gateway biography for the Marley-curious in part because it reads like a novel, full of high-stakes standoffs and tense dialogue. In “So Much Things to Say,” Steffens fixes on more mundane details: the date and the location of recording sessions, the exact occupation of Marley’s estranged father (a “ferro-cement engineer,” not a naval officer, as is often reported), the jug of mysterious juice that Marley toured with late in life. Steffens is largely here to direct traffic. But his authority derives from exhausting every possibility. Two people, for example, offer equally vivid memories of Marley writing “I Shot the Sheriff.” A former lover claims that the song is an allegory about birth control; one of Marley’s white friends describes it as a private joke they had “about him hanging out with this white guy, me.”

The book’s drama accumulates around the question of what set Marley apart from his bandmates Livingston and Tosh, who many in “So Much Things to Say” thought were at least as talented. Colin Leslie, Marley’s business manager, suggests that one advantage Marley had was that “he had spent time in America, in Delaware, and he was exposed to industry and the corporate world.” He returned with a sense of “how things should be ordered in business.” Perhaps it was Marley’s desire for a broader, more stable platform that allowed him to accept concessions that others rejected. The original Wailers broke up, in 1974, because Livingston balked at Blackwell’s suggestion that they begin playing underground “freak clubs.” In Livingston’s mind, their music was “for children now,” not for gays or people who tinkered with synthetic drugs. Though Livingston was ousted from the band, he was at peace with his stance: “I felt good because I wasn’t going to wallow in no shit.”

Tosh left, too, fed up with Blackwell’s relentless “fuckery.” (Tosh also accused Marley of siding with Blackwell because he was half white.) In 1974, Marley reëmerged with a new album, “Natty Dread,” credited to his newly reconfigured band, Bob Marley and the Wailers. In the eyes of many, Blackwell had finally succeeded in breaking apart the band’s core; it was easier to promote Marley than Livingston, with his unrelenting faith, or Tosh, a provocateur fond of referring to the owner of Island Records as Chris “Whitewell” or “Whiteworst.” As Marley’s solo career took off, Higgs, who briefly joined his touring band, came to see him as a bit of a “user.” Lee Jaffe, known as “the white Wailer” because he was one of the few white people in the group’s inner sanctum, recalls that his friendship with Marley nearly ended when Marley refused to stand up to his label, which changed the spelling of his album title from “Knotty Dread” to “Natty Dread” against his wishes.

There’s an argument that the Wailers’ true visionary was Peter Tosh, not Bob Marley. Where Marley became a symbol of peace and unity for a troubled nation, Tosh remained combative and politically militant. After the gunmen shot up his home, Marley moved to England in a kind of self-imposed exile. He returned to Jamaica two years later, to headline the One Love concert, which was an attempt to bring the country together while a bloody political war raged in the streets. In the middle of the song “Jammin’,” Marley invited the rival party leaders Michael Manley and Edward Seaga onstage, and the three of them held their hands up together. It was a powerful image. But for Tosh, who had been onstage hours earlier and blasted both parties, what Jamaicans needed was not peace but justice. “Peace is death,” he later explained. “Your passport to heaven. Most people don’t know that.” Unity was false hope.

In the mid-seventies, Marley found audiences far beyond the “sufferers” of Trench Town. One of his friends contends that the singer drifted “a little to the right of the Jamaican political spectrum as he came closer and closer to the white and brown Jamaican elite.” Don Taylor, his former manager, says that Blackwell turned Marley into “a beggar of the jet set.” Still, Marley was entering spaces unimaginable to previous generations of Jamaicans who, like him, had come from nothing. He lived down the road from the Prime Minister. He had brought Rastafari, long seen as an outlaw cult, into the mainstream. And he gave freely to those in need. Judy Mowatt, a member of the I-Three, Marley’s backing vocalists, explains that he had come to view himself as the reincarnation of the Biblical Joseph, who had provided corn to the children of Israel during the famine. “We see the work that Bob come back to do now, that he has regathered his people, and he’s feeding the people with a more spiritual corn in this time.”

Yet Marley was troubled by the demographics of his growing number of disciples. In September, 1980, he arrived in New York. He was touring “Uprising,” his most religious album yet. He was scheduled to open for the Commodores at Madison Square Garden—a strange booking, given that Marley himself was world famous. He had already played more than thirty dates in Europe, including a concert at Milan’s San Siro stadium that drew a hundred and twenty thousand people—more than the Pope had drawn a week earlier. The Commodores, meanwhile, were on the downside of a career highlighted by the featherweight soul hits “Easy” and “Three Times a Lady.” But they still drew the predominantly African-American audience that Marley craved. His failure to dent the black-radio market in America had been one of the lingering frustrations of his career.

Part of this failure had been by design. In the seventies, Blackwell marketed Marley to white, college-educated rock fans and maturing hippies, who were drawn to reggae as earthy and authentic. But in return for performing with the Commodores, Frankie Crocker, arguably the most powerful black-radio d.j. and programmer of the late seventies, promised that his station would play Marley’s new single, “Could You Be Loved,” every hour on the hour for three months. And Marley, who was sandwiched on the bill between Kurtis Blow and the Commodores, was confident that his live show would eviscerate everyone else’s. He was right. As Alvin (Seeco) Patterson, the Wailers’ drummer, recalls, “I remember when Bob finish, everybody walked out.”

When Marley fell ill a few days later, he was about to sign a monumental new record deal with a ten-million-dollar advance. That didn’t happen. His most famous album was to be “Legend,” a 1984 hits collection released by Island Records, which has become one of the best-selling albums of all time. His role in turning reggae into a worldwide phenomenon is one of the reasons the category of “world music” was invented, in 1987, to help stars break out from beyond America and Europe, many of whom inevitably get described as the Bob Marley of their homeland. And yet much of Marley and the Wailers’ story remains untold. Livingston has never allowed Steffens to turn eighteen hundred pages of interview transcripts into a book. Tosh began committing his life story to audiotape before he was murdered in 1987; the so-called Red X tapes provided the basis for a documentary on Tosh but have otherwise never been released. The struggle over the meanings of Marley remains unresolved, and no doubt unresolvable.

In 1984, just three years after Marley’s death, the Jamaican producer King Jammy and singer Wayne Smith released “Under Mi Sleng Teng,” a groundbreaking dancehall single built on a digital rhythm track. This revolutionary sound, as well as brash new stars like Yellowman, made Marley’s roots-reggae style seem antiquated. In Colin Grant’s “Natural Mystics,” an excellent 2011 book about the Wailers, there’s a scene in which Livingston finds himself on a concert bill alongside Shabba Ranks and Ninjaman, roughneck antiheroes who were known for their violent, sexually charged lyrics. It’s a world that the Wailers, outlaws in their own day, enabled, but not the one they created. He’s sad and frustrated as the crowd wearies of his slow-burning roots music.

One of the reasons Marley’s life requires the complication Steffens’s book attempts is that the singer became a model for how artistic legacy has turned into an industry of its own. He has become a myth capacious enough to absorb every new revelation. What happened with Marley is what often happens nowadays to charismatic artists who die young: core beliefs are trimmed and edited for accessibility, and a new, simplified consensus forms. A belief system is reduced to a single, strident pose; rebelliousness becomes an untamed essence that travels everywhere, imbuing things, like lighters or headphones, with mystical vibes. Even as the music business shrivels, an artist’s legacy—especially one that is defiant and uplifting—will continue to be a reliable, ever-renewable asset. At least it’s Marley’s family that benefits.

Steffens closes his book with a chapter of friends and collaborators sharing their favorite Marley tunes. It’s a way of creating a “spiritual foundation,” in the words of the Wailers’ guitarist Junior Marvin, that will last for eternity. At the same time, it enables us to imagine Marley’s career as an arc extending through the eighties, the nineties, and beyond. We believe that he wouldn’t have had to change with the times—that he would have resisted whatever was to come, or seen an alternative to it. This is the most intoxicating part of the Marley myth: the dream that someone had the answers; if only he had survived long enough to save us all. ♦